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New Media, New Crises, New Theories?

An Interview With David Morley
a

Miyase Christensen & David Morley

a

Stockholm University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Goldsmiths College
Published online: 14 Nov 2014.

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To cite this article: Miyase Christensen & David Morley (2014) New Media, New Crises, New Theories?
An Interview With David Morley, Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and
Culture, 12:4, 208-222, DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2014.960572
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Popular Communication, 12: 208222, 2014

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1540-5702 print / 1540-5710 online
DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2014.960572

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INTERVIEW

New Media, New Crises, New Theories? An Interview

With David Morley
Miyase Christensen
Stockholm University
KTH Royal Institute of Technology

David Morley
Goldsmiths College

Miyase Christensen (MC): Thank you for this interview-essay for our special issue,
Technology and the Question of Empowerment. To start with some general questions: How do
you see the state of affairs in terms of the ways in which the notions of technology and power
are employedor rather positionedtoday? There are parallels and disjunctures in how they
pop up in popular discourse on the one hand, and in academic writing on media and communication studies on the other. There are different trends, so to speak, such as those that emphasize
affordances over impacts, and those that emphasize risks. Where do you stand on these questions?
David Morley (DM): Well, I think about that in relation to an even more basic question, which is
how you conceive of the discipline or the field within which you compose that problem. As you
know, Ive talked in recent years about the notion of a non-mediacentric communication studies
and it is within that context that I would see this problem. Approaches which focus on a given
technology, and then attribute some kind of magical powers to that (whether in a Utopian or in
a dystopian mode) really dont interest me very much. I think, again and again they lead us up a
blind alley. The astonishing thing is that it happens so many times, and with each new technology
you see this incredible focus on the thing itself, as if its going to have powers of one kind or
another over its users. I just dont buy any of that.
We were talkinginformallya few moments ago about Don Slater, who has a lovely example, from some of his work in West Africa, where there are two different villages and one of them
Correspondence should be addressed to Miyase Christensen, Stockholm University, Department of Media Studies,
Karlavgen 104, Floor 5, Box 27 861, Stockholm 115 93, Sweden. E-mail: miyase@kth.se

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gets a lot of money from UNESCO or some funding body, and sets up a special air-conditioned
building, with computers with fast modems and everything. However, its built in a slightly out
of the way place and so its not very well used. Then, in another case, there is some American
Peace Corps volunteer, whos going home after working in this village for a while. Hes got an
old laptop, its not very good, but he gives it to a guy that hes become friends with who owns a
caf, and the caf happens to be just next to the bus stop and the taxi stands where lots of people pass through en route to the local markets. It turns out that this one rather limited piece of
technology (in terms of technical capacity) makes more difference because it is plugged into that
set of transport and gossip networks than all the very powerful technologies in the other special
building, which dont really fit into the culture. So I think thats a very clear example of the
extent to which technology (whatever its affordances might be) needs to be set in the right kind
of context, in order to deliver any significant change of any kind.
I do think that notion of affordances, that Ian Hutchby came up with, is quite an interesting
concept, but when you look closely at the model that he offers, I dont see what it does that Halls
earlier preferred reading model doesnt do. It just repeats all those things in Halls model about
how a technology has got a particular set of designs built into it, which are intended for it to be
used in this way, and heres a set of marketing discourses that propose that it is of interest, for this
or that reason. It is exactly the same thing, the preferring of a set of meanings and uses which
people may or may not actually take up. So, Im happy to see people working with Hutchbys
concept, rather than with the rather crazy notion of technologies having effects all over again, but
I dont see it as the marvelous intellectual advance that it is sometimes proposed to be. I suppose
what astonishes me most is the people I come across in the field, who are very sophisticated
theoretically in lots of ways, about the media and modernity and globalization and all the rest of
it, but when they talk about technology they revert to a kind of hypodermic effects model. Its
as if all the audience research that so many peopleAnn Gray, James Lull, Roger Silverstone,
Shaun Mooreshave done, over 30 or 40 years, about technology had never happened. Many of
them just dont even know about it. They really do think that the world begins again with digital
media and that digital media have such phenomenal consequences that are way beyond the scale
of anything thats happened ever before. When I teach my course on audiences at Goldsmiths
I always begin by making the students sit and listen to the first twenty minutes of the radio
broadcast of Orson Welles The War of the Worlds radio broadcast from the 1930s. For them,
its absolutely unimaginable that radio could have ever been powerful or frightening. So they
find it really hard to take it seriously, but I make them listen to twenty minutes of it and think
about how exactly Welles has structured the text to make it credible in certain ways. After a bit,
perhaps they begin to get the ideaoh yeah, maybe once people thought about radio the way in
which we get excited about Macs or iPhones, or whatever. But they only half get it. And thats
understandable among young students, but I also see so much of that among my colleagues in the
profession: that is disappointingand theres an awful lot of it about!
MC: Yes. There is indeed a lot of that. We also see media ecology and related frameworks and
approaches retaining their currency or being reasserted with new dimensions added. As you
suggest, while we see change and progress toward more sophisticated understandings of, say,
globalization and society, when it comes to technology there is still a tendency to revert to a
shockingly deterministic take on it.

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DM: Well, the other day somebody got in touch with me about a session Im going to be doing at
a conference in the near future and they were suggesting, in all seriousness, that one of the things
that we needed to discuss was the work of Nicholas Carr, and I and the other people involved in
this session at the conference said we had never heard of Nicholas Carr. So I looked it up and I
discovered its that guy who wrote a book about how the internet is changing our brains. Its one
of those new-style hypodermic effects models of neuroscience, which forgets about cognition and
wants to see the effects of the media on the brain. The idea that Im supposed to pay attention to
a thesis that a piece of machinery is actually changing peoples brains and thats how we should
understand the media ecology of our time, really doesnt do a lot for me. I cant see even what
there is to say about it, really. Its so banal. Its just so crude, to go back again to this notion of
machines doing things to us.
MC: Yes, but has it really ever disappeared? I think that discourse is still alive and kicking.
DM: Well, its carried on alive and kicking for quite a long time. But, I think it got a real boost
once it attached itself to the question of new media because people were able to forget all the
critiques that had been made of that approach, in relation to television or whatever, and imagine
that we had to start all over again, just because its a computer this time around.
MC: To go back to disciplinary battles, or rather battles between different schools of thinking
especially when it comes to understanding the undercurrents in society or what technologies are
doing or not doing for underprivileged people and communities: the notorious rift between political economy and cultural studies is still very much discernable. This is particularly the case when
it comes to the ways in which power is conceptualizedin and of itself but also in relation to
technology. As we know, and to put it roughly, political economy, historically, put more emphasis
on structural inequality, social (dis)empowerment or other forms of disempowerment and questions of labor, whilst we have seen individual(ized) empowerment and expressive capacity (of
technology) occupying more space in some veins of cultural studiesat least in the past two
decades. Again, I am clearly brushing with broad strokes here. We have also witnessed numerous
debates in the field addressing precisely this rift and the differences in approach. So, decades
after these debates first started to take shape, where do we stand today from your perspective?
You were talking about the cyclical trend, that the effects model routinely making a comeback.
Areas of research, for instance, where we often see techno-deterministic analyses are studies of
media use amongst migrants or social movements and the use of technology. Perhaps one could
construct a version of the same story through the lens of political economy and another version
through that of cultural studies. Perhaps one could further ask whether it is the case that questions
of technology and globalization further widened that gap, instead of providing meeting points,
particularly in terms of how we should regard empowerment, consumption, spatialization and the
presumed withering-away-of-geography. This is a very broad and packed question, but could you
try to articulate how you regard these issues?
DM: Well, there are some curious aspects. I mean its no secret that my colleague James Curran
and I at Goldsmiths have spent most of our intellectual careers in battle with each other, criticizing each others workin a collegial mannerbut nonetheless its all been quite forthright.
Finally, it seemed that we had found one thing to agree about in recent years in relation to the

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big project that James and Natalie Fenton and Des Freedman and others have done, funded by
the Leverhulme Media Trust, about the internet. They have actually been rather helpful in insisting on the ways in which a political economy perspective can illuminate that terrain, so that can
get you away from the silly notion that we are all empowered consumers, who can make any
number of choices we like. You can see how that latter strand, within what was originally a cultural studies kind of perspective (as now represented say by someone like Henry Jenkins) has run
riot. In that approach, youve got the notion of active audiences carried to an exaggerated degree.
We dont even think about audiences anymore because were all apparently prosumers as much
as consumers and everybody is supposedly transmitting as well as receiving. Which would all be
very nice, if it was true. If you go back to Bertolt Brechts little piece about the theory of the
radio, written in the 1930s, that was him imagining all the positive things that could be done with
the radio, in that respect. If you think about Raymond Williams and the notion about technology
developing within particular circumstances, you can see that the particular form that radio happened to end up taking, as a mass broadcasting medium, was only one way it might have goneit
was not built into the technology.
Now, what political economy can contribute to that debate is some statistical work, which tells
you that actually, with any system like the internet, 90% of the people will simply be downloading, 9% might be uploading a bit, and 1% of the people are uploading like crazy. I mean, its
useful to be reminded of those things. Its useful to be reminded, as James and his colleagues
tell us, what a vast proportion of web traffic goes through a very small number of websites, controlled by a small number of companies. Its useful to trace, as Des Freeman has done, the way in
which the political potential of the internet has been corralled and challenged by a whole series
of commercial factors, so I think thats an important contribution. However, at the same time, its
not going to help to just say okay, so now we know who owns it, we can predict everything.
That would be going back to the same old mistakes political economy always made in relation to
earlier mediamistakes like, once we know the ownership of the media we can predict the content
and therefore we can predict the effect. As someone formed within a cultural studies tradition,
Im well aware of the debate that you refer to, but Im not really sure how helpful it is to go on
even having that debate because, from my point of view, power has always been the key thing I
was interested in. I mean, I did audiences work, not out of some kind of romantic notion of proving that the media didnt matter and that ideology didnt count, because everybody was busy
being a kind of semiological guerrilla and making radically different creative interpretations of
everything. No, I did audience work in order to trace the limits of power. I was interested in how
we understand the question of power, how we had to understand the question of hegemony, as an
inherently unstable system. So far as I could see, the best way to do that was to operationalize the
concepts and see what actually happened in practice at the moment at which the structure of the
text or the design of the technology meets the capacities (or the cultural capital) and competencies
of the users. I still think that interface is where everything has to be resolved, so that kind of game
of intellectual ping-pong where the political economy says all that matters is the ownership and
the cultural studies chorus replies no, no, all that matters is the users . . . I mean its just a very
boring dispute that could go on forever. There are useful things within both of those traditions,
but again, whats interesting to look at is the way in which, over time, those debates correlate
with particular technological changes.
You get a very interesting turn around, in the mid-1990s, when John Fiske and his concept of
active audiences went out of style, big time, and it was criticized to death as pointless populism,

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which we were told, apparently had been a stupid idea to begin with. We then get people like
Simon Frith saying that cultural studies were bound to lead to this kind of depoliticized (if
not reactionary) celebration of the individual, etc. Whats interesting, though, is that at that point
Henry Jenkins was a little known student of John Fiskes, who was mainly working on a very
limited project about fan cultures. But if you think about how the influence of his work, over
the years, has come back into the mainstream, in the context of debates about convergence culture, suddenly youve got a kind of Fiskean version of active technology uses, on overdrive, on
steroids, which has suddenly become massively fashionable again, years after Fiske was (apparently) dismissed. This has got all kinds of complications, to do with questions of generations
and technological change. One of the most interesting PhD students weve had at Goldsmiths
was a Taiwanese guy called Vinnie Yu, who was doing a study of the way in which Taiwanese
young people, between the ages of about 18 and 22, were really into file sharing and downloading and that kind of creative techno-swapping of things. The project was initially conceived of
as a demonstration of how the media landscape was changing and how much more active this
generation was going to be, with its new technological competencies. But for various incidental
reasons, he had problems with his funding, and the PhD took much longer than anticipated, and it
turned into a longitudinal study, so four or five years later, he went back and interviewed some of
the same people that he had interviewed when they were younger, and some of them had now got
married, and had kids, and become more domesticated in their lives. And guess what, they were
sitting around watching television. It turned out that the kind of high level of technical, creative
activity that theyd displayed at that previous time was, in fact, particular to a specific period
of their life, that period of late adolescence when people have more disposable time. Once you
insert these questions of life cycle as well as generational change, it gets much more complicated,
because then you can zoom around the other way and make more sense of phenomena like the
silver surfersi.e., old people, who display surprising interest and capacity with new technologies. Why? Because they have a lot of disposable time in which to figure it out. Obviously this
is not all old people, only old people with a certain level of income and a certain level of education and technical competence. But it is instructive to think about these intersections between
changes in intellectual fashion, technological change, historical change, and also to map that
against the question of life cycle changes, and the circular process through which you have to
then understand the development and changes in peoples lifestyles, and also in cycles of product
development and replacement. I think its quite difficult to hold both the narrative version of
historical change and those cyclical dimensions in your mind at the same time, but without both,
youre sunk, because those are the things you have to take on board. Thats a very long answer to
your question!
MC: No, that is indeed perfectly fine. And, as for Henry Jenkins, there are fans as well as bashers,
and you are suggesting that he followed the same trajectory as Fiske. So, in a way we could say,
as in this case, that some ideas become very fashionable and have purchase for a while, and then
it becomes fashionable to bash those very ideas.
DM: Absolutely, which is crazy, because there is a moment when Henry does get onto something
very, very interestingwhen he talks about the early point when some of the smartest guys in
the big companies began to see how they could actually mobilize fan culture for their own benefit
and when they began to see how, again, the industry and the users could actually construct a sort

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of strange marriage of convenience. Hes perfectly right about that, I think. The only problem
is when he then generalizes to imagine that everybody is doing all this stuff, which is why I
told you the story about Taiwan and how it turns out that, even in a situation where a majority
of people of a particular class and educational background might be doing something like that,
theyre likely only to be doing so at a certain stage of their lives. They might do it again at a
later stage (when theyre retired, perhaps, and have spare time again), but theres going to be a
middle period, when they are working like hell, looking after small children, etc., and they are not
going to be doing lots of file sharing and downloading. Because you know, these are time-based
mediaI think thats one of the things thats forgotten again and again. There are only 24 hours
in peoples days. Even if you introduce the capacity to multitask, which sort of multiplies time
in a way (although it also fragments it) there are only a certain number of hours and a certain
amount of time that can be devoted to this stuffand material determinants and cultural and
social determinants are terribly important here.
MC: I think that is quite common in academia, isnt it? It is not that we are just trying to capture
what exactly is going on. In other words, it is not just an intellectual enterprise. We are always
on the look for the next paradigm shift. Perhaps technology provided just that and, especially
initially, we saw technology in a blown-out-of-proportion way.
DM: I think some of the most interesting work on academia and publishing in this country in
recent years has been done by John Thomson. He hasnt done quite what Im talking about, but
I think there is a very interesting study to do which, picking up on what you say there, looks
at the intersection of the way in which we, as academics, could all be said to be always on the
lookout for the next paradigm shift. But I think we can be more precise than that: if I think
about the impact of a kind of Thatcherite, entrepreneurial, self-promotional culture within British
academia, I see many younger colleagues very much caught up in the need to make a mark for
themselves, to establish their brand identity, and so its partly a matter of career trajectory, but
its not just that, because it also has to do with the effects of the publishing industry. You know,
Routledge did John Fiske no favorswhen John was hot property he foolishly let Routledge
push him into publishing three books in three years, and thats what blew it, it was just too much,
it was market saturation, and I think Henry Jenkins has actually suffered something of the same
miscalculation in recent years. But publishing pressure is a very strong element, and changes in
the structure of university employment, in Britain and elsewhere, are a very serious issue. There
is now such a lot of pressure on young academics to demonstrate their impact in the field.
Ive got a very good PhD student who cant even get an interview for a job because he hasnt
yet published a major book or got any big grants. But the guy is only 27. If all that had been
demanded of me, at that stage, I would have found it very difficult. So, there are huge pressures
on people, which drive them toward this exaggeration of the newness of their own ideas, and
apparently lead to those much-heralded paradigm breaks with everything that was ever known
before.
MC: Yes, I think in some ways we are manufacturing narratives and one way to make our mark
is to come up with a concept or thematic approach. In some cases, the quality of the analysis,
which one might have spent 510 years on, comes second. If one has written the book or come
with a catchy conceptsometimes not alwaysit catches fire. But, that can lead to consuming
our credit fast too.

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DM: I think its very sad, but those are important pressures, and in a way I can kind of hear a
critical voice in my own head, saying oh no, youre being very reductive, but I think there is
also a serious sociology of knowledge perspective on all of this. To put it another way, I cant
see how its going to get done, but if Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar were able to replicate
their book on laboratory life in an academic setting, that would tell us quite a lot about what
actually happens in academic institutions, and the extent to which it genuinely has to do with the
exchange of ideas and the development of new paradigms, as opposed to the necessity, especially
in this country, under the pressure of the idiotic Research Excellence Framework imposed by the
government, of demonstrating your impact, demonstrating how many grants youve got. I mean
thats become the name of the game, rather than the actual research. Its now no longer enough
that I should do research and that I should publish it. My institution is really rather disappointed
that I dont spend the rest of my time tweeting about it. The idea now is that as soon as I do
something, I should be tweeting about it and publicizing it and coming up with pictures of it
that can be put on the departmental website to enhance student recruitment, because everyone
will see what fantastic interesting things are happening at Goldsmiths, every day, etc. And in
a competitive market, maybe the institution has to do that, but then you have to recognize the
seriously deleterious effects of that pressure on the actual conduct of intellectual work. And its
very hard for some younger colleagues to resist that pressure, to refuse to comply with what has
rightly been called a system of licensed boasting about your own, or your department, or your
institutions so-called excellence.
MC: You mean when we cannot invent something new, we go back to the basics and take up
those debates?
DM: Well, I mean, the reference I made to Latour and Woolgar might have sounded glib, but I
meant it very seriously. I cant quite see how you would get funding for it, but their work pays
serious attention to what actually happens in a science laboratory, the extent to which, even there,
in the laboratory, its to do with career calculations, its to do with what the next grant is going to
be about, its to do with knowing what the next call for applications is going to be about. I think
also, although Bourdieu was always a terrible enemy of cultural studies in a lot of ways and quite
straightforwardly blocked the development of cultural studies in various French institutions by
his denunciation of cultural studies as a no good, mongrel discipline with which he didnt want
anything to dononetheless, there are certain parts of Bourdieus work which I think are very
interesting in this respect, about the labor of being an academic. Theres a kind of biographical
film about him called Sociology as a Martial Artdont know if youve ever seen it?
MC: I havent seen it.
DM: In it, theres some rather interesting material where hes filmed talking to junior colleagues
about how they are managing their careers, and hes talking to Loc Wacquant, who at that point
was really quite junior, although he later became a huge star. Bourdieu gives him such a hard
time in the film, because it turns out that, as far as Bourdieu is concerned, Wacquant is being
too productive, in a showy mannerhes putting out too many journal articles, speaking at
too many conferences, hes having too much impact and, as a result, hes not finishing his
major book. So Bourdieu criticises him, and he says No, dont you do thatthis summer, go on
holiday, go somewhere very quietby all means swim or play tennis every morning, but spend

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your days doing the real work, do not do any more of this froth. And to see that now is a real
tonic, I mean, no Head of Department in Britain could say that to a junior colleague anymore,
theyd say the opposite: get out on Twitter, demonstrate some more impact, get another grant.
The more froth, the better!

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MC: Going back to technology and mediation: do you see differences between regions such
as scholarship or research traditions originating from the United States, the United Kingdom,
continental Europe, or Latin America in terms of the ways in which technology and mediation
are regarded?
DM: Im not sure. Ive actually had less to do with American perspectives on these matters in
recent years. There was a period in which I was quite involved in American academia and went
there quite a lot as visiting professor at various places. And there are certain people in the States
whose work I still have a profound interest in, people like Lynn Spigel, her work on television
and technology, old colleagues from cultural studies like Dick Hebdige in California, or in the
younger people like Jonathan Gray at Madison, who I think are doing very interesting work. But
I dont actually see a distinctive and original set of perspectives coming out of the American
academy at the moment. I had someone recently asking me where should they consider doing a
PhD in the United States, and I was hard pushed to think of where it would be really good for
them to go.
Im not sure that this debate about mediation has quite taken off in the same way in the United
States that it has in Europe. As youre very well aware, whether you call it mediation or mediatization, thats clearly become a kind of hot topic over here. I find it a bit difficult myself,
because when people say to me mediation, I can recognize it historicallyif you go back to
Jess Martn Barbero, when he comes up with the concept of mediation, I think thats a very interesting approach. Thats one of the resonances in my mind when I talk about a non-mediacentric
media studies, thats precisely what Martn Barbero and Nstor Garca Canclini begin to do, to
set questions about media in a much more interesting, broad dynamic of cultural or demographic
change. That Im interested in. But when people now talk about mediation, the question I find
myself worrying about is: what happened before mediation? When was before mediation? What
is it thats not mediated? As far as Im concerned, this dialogue were having is mediated by
language, its a social system. The words, as Volosinov says, dont belong to me or to you, they
belong to a system of language. Our interaction, even face-to-face, is mediated, and it always
was. So thats a problem. Unless someone can show me the nonmediated, then Im a bit puzzled
as to what mediation is. Okay, so then the argument shifts a little bit, so well, nowadays weve
got face-to-face communication, but weve also got this secondary activity of mediated conversation on the mobile phone, or whatever. Well, okay, fine. There is a kind of overlay of virtual
and mediated interactions, in that technical sense, alongside (and in some cases substituted for,
but more commonly along with) face-to-face interaction. But thats not how people talk about it.
They just want to talk about the technically mediated aspects of contemporary communication,
which doesnt seem to me all that interesting.
I get students who come to me and say I want to do a project on the social media. My first
question is, Yeah, okay, but what are the nonsocial media? And you know, if television isnt a
social medium, I dont know what is. And radio is a social medium, and so is the newspaper. This
idea of there being a new realm of social media which should be studied in a specific discipline

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of mediation studies just doesnt interest me. Its the same reason why I never wanted to be
part of anything called audience studies or reception studiescarving the field up in these
sort of specialist subdisciplines, I think its nonsensical. And I know there are a lot of reasons to
do ityou referred a few moments ago to conferences and sections of conferences. If you take
the major institutions in the field, thats exactly what they encourage you to do. They encourage
you do be a member of this sub-section of the ICA or the IAMCR on audiences or the section
on development or something, and its just the same issue for mediation studies, in this case.
I think that some of the issues that have been raised in discussions on mediation and mediatization
can be very interesting, but Im very worried by the tendency to abstract it and make it a kind of
specialist, freestanding, separated area of activity and enquiry. I dont think thats a good way to
do it. I dont think its productive.
MC: Do you think, in that way, media and communication studies is doing a disservice to itself?
Could we say more sobering accounts are coming from other disciplines such as sociology, geography, or anthropology? In other words, do you maintain we have concentrated too much on
media and mediation in media and communication studies?
DM: Well, yes I think thats true, I dont mean to criticize people for doing it, I think thats
again a perfectly understandable response to the kind of career and publishing and conferenceappearance pressures that exist, but the thing is, Im not really that interested in media studies, I
dont really care very much what media studies does or doesnt do. For me, categorizing myself
as I do as a cultural studies scholar, Im interested in wherever the good stuff is, and at present,
I would say in the last two years, by far the most interesting work on the media has been coming
out of anthropology. There was a period in the mid-1990s, when anthropology was panicking
badly about losing students to media and cultural studies and trying to fight against it and claim
the terrain for its own, in its terms, and that created a very dull, competitive and sterile debate.
But more recently, youve got people like Daniel Miller and Mirca Madianou and Don Slater and
Brian Larkin in the Statesanthropologists who are doing just more interesting work about the
media than people who call themselves media scholars. So thats what Im reading. I dont read
very many media journals. There isnt much in them that interests me. I read a lot of anthropology,
I read a lot of cultural geography, I read a fair bit of history, but ultimately Im most interested in
work that pertains to the problems Im trying to understand. Whether or not it comes from media
studies or communications studies is actually immaterial to me.
MC: We are also seeing efforts towards defining and redefining what media actually are today.
Miller and Madianou, for instance, are talking about polymedia, not media. Do such redefinitions have significance from the perspective of critical theory? Are such definitions crucial in
our efforts to understand what place media occupy in social life and everyday life today?
DM: Newness is a historical constant. Every generation always believes that the technology of
its day really is different. They recognise, sometimes, that other things have been new before,
but in their case, they believe this time it really is differentand its just a continual delusion.
People talk about ours as a particularly mobile era, or an era of particularly rapid technological
change. But if you look at historical work, such as that of Steven Kern on the late 19th century,
he demonstrates that, in relative terms, that period was much more mobile than ours and the rate

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of technological change was much faster in the late 19th century than it is now. So no, I just
dont buy any of this stuff to do with the notion that todays new media is a whole different
topic. To go back to what you were saying about Danny Miller and Mirca Madianous book, the
interesting thing about polymedia for me, is that what they do (and they do it very well, and
Im glad they do it) is to take us back to socio-linguistics. In socio-linguistics, the classic study by
Fishman is the question of who says what, in which language, to whom. Well, all polymedia
does is say okay, weve all now got lots of communicative choices, weve got a menu of choices
and we can decide to use this medium for that topic and another for that purpose or topicbut
thats just what socio-linguistics have always studied, it is just that now we can do that in relation
to mediated conversation as well. I dont see that as some amazing breakthrough, its more of a
realization of what a classical perspective can still say to us, in a new context.
MC: Precisely. This has to do with the ambiguities that come with new media forms and tools.
Are apps interface or technology? The same applies to other artefacts and platformshence,
perhaps, the need to continuously come up with new concepts and terms.
DM: Well, you see, if were going to have definitions of fields, I am much more interested in
a field that would describe itself as communications than I am in a field that would define itself
as media studies. Historically, certainly when I first taught it in the 1970s, communication was a
discipline which included interpersonal communication and included linguistics, as a matter of
course. The fact that I now teach students who know nothing about language, nothing at all about
linguistics, I think is disgraceful. A narrowly defined discipline of media studies risks banality
coming upon it with increasing speed. So, Im more interested in communications than media
studies. In my own work, Im going back to more 19th century classical definition of communications, the one that Marx and Engels use when they talk about communications being to do with
the movement of information, persons and commodities. So my definition of communications
also includes physical mobilities, and transport, a whole set of ordinary, material infrastructures,
and of course, the relation between the material and the virtual. Theres a whole terrain of stuff
there which media studies, in its incarnation in the last 30 or 40 years, has completely discarded,
very foolishly as far as I am concerned. So I think if you look at the work of people like Brian
Larkin, who I referred to earlier, and also Lisa Parks, they are doing very interesting work, to
bring those infrastructural or material questions back into consideration.
MC: So it is, in a way, avoiding hard questions we could say. Avoiding that complexity. Mediation
perhaps is simpler to deal with than communication.
DM: Well, at that point, the mobile phone plays havoc with that conceptualization. Which discipline is going to claim the mobile phone? Is it claimed simply as a medium, or is it claimed as
a mode of speech? Well, it has to be both, surelyto try to conceptualize it as either one or the
other is nonsensical. Of course there are often very, very good institutional, rather than intellectual, explanations why things are called what they are. I mean, theres an institution that is part of
Goldsmiths that is called the Cultural Studies Centre, it kind of owns the name cultural studies
within the institution, though it doesnt do anything, as far as Im concerned, thats related to
cultural studies. It teaches a kind of postmodern, highly abstracted theory of Risk Society. On the
other hand, people like Angela McRobbie and I have worked for years in something called a

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Media and Communications department, although we both think of ourselves as doing cultural
studies. I tried to get the word cultural studies incorporated into our own departments name
at a certain point, but I was told it wasnt possible because the name was already owned by
another department, which is crazy!
MC: Again, going back to technology and empowerment: certain discursive frames keep reemerging especially during or in the aftermath of certain social phenomena and events such as
the Arab Spring. During the latter events, we saw many accounts of how it was a revolution
enabled primarily by online platforms and mobile media. Shortly afterwards, we saw more sobering accounts. What kind of scope can cultural studies offer to go beyond the cyclical re-emergence
and clash of techno-deterministic versus counter-deterministic debates?
DM: Thats actually two rather different questions, let me begin by trying to answer the first part
of it, about the debate in relation to the Arab spring. The thing that surprised me most was that
there wasnt even much reference to the most obviously relevant text, which was the book by
Annabel Sreberny and her ex-husband, Ali Mohammadi, called Small Media, Big Revolution,
which was a very, very careful study of the particular way the cassette tapes of Ayatollah
Khomeini (recorded in Paris, and imported into Iran by underground routes) replayed on little tape recorders, made a huge contribution to the process of social change in Iran. What was
astonishing was that even that evidence, which is only thirty years old, wasnt referred to. The
hoo-ha about, you know, the Facebook revolution or whatever, I mean that was just beyond
belief, really.
I mean, I remember being in Cairo at some point around then and talking to someone there
about it, and they said to me well actually no, the really important thing was the gossip network between the taxi drivers, that had actually much more of a role to play than Facebook.
The problem was that the very small, highly educated, middle class, progressive elite, who had
organized themselves through Facebook, was stuck exactly at that level, until they began to think
about how their networks of communication could make some kind of effective connection with
a much broader population, which is what you needed to fill Tahrir Square. You cant fill Tahrir
square with people on Facebook because there arent enough people in Cairo who are literate
and have got access to it. So the thing that becomes much more interesting is when you pay
attention to the particular role that specific technologies have played in a given situation. Without
getting technologically determinist about it, you can say that a technology with a given set of
affordances, such as the internet, will have differential significance in settings in which the
mass media are more, rather than less controlled, and in which there is more rather than less censorship. I can remember when the Internet began, my friends in Cairo then, back in the 1990s,
were terribly excited about it, and they couldnt understand why I wasnt quite so excited. But
that was because I was living in London, with a relatively free set of media institutions and with
relatively easy access to a lot of information, and some of the best libraries in Europe accessible
to me nearby. They were in Cairo, starved of information, in a heavily censored regime. In that
situation, a given technology, be it the internet, be it the mobile phone or whatever, can have a
quite particular significance. I think its important to recognize the different contextual significance of technologies, rather than thinking of technologies simply having inherent properties
which will then have automatic effects. As far as the Arab Spring thing goes, we can see it today
in relation to Istanbul, clearly, without access to YouTube, without mobile phone cameras and so

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on, youd be seeing very little at all of whats been happening in Gezi Park, because the Turkish
media certainly arent going to show it, but that only makes sense in the much broader context
of the political structure of the forces of organized opposition in Turkey and how they relate to
a whole set of different social groups and structures. The technologies have to be made sense of
in that context. The abstraction that somehow the Middle East was going to be changed by the
iPhone or by Facebook, I mean, its insulting to people to think thatits not just laughable, but
insulting. Its like a return to the long discarded ideas of the 1960s, about how the transistor radio
would somehow modernize the whole Middle East, in Daniel Lerners fantasy, as funded by
the government.
MC: It is. And, its astonishing to see some journal issues dedicated to that.
DM: As to your second question about what cultural studies can contribute to these debates, I
think Ive already said what I think about that. For me, its not so much to do with what you
may think of as cultural studies, as the attempt to use that interdisciplinary perspective to broaden
our understanding of communications, to think about the mobilities of persons, to think about
cultural geographies, to think about infrastructures, to think about all of those things, and about
what we can do to understand those situations better. You know, in Cairo, one of the crucial days
was when the people from that initial Facebook network went out into the poor suburbs. It was a
very old-fashioned Leninist-style thing, you go to those streets, and go around chanting until you
gather enough people behind you to back you up. It was highly organized, and it was, in the end,
to do with being physically on the streets and chantingit wasnt technically mediated at all at
that moment. It depended on walking backwards and forwards through the poor neighborhoods,
chanting songs about the price of bread and about corruption in the government, and gradually
collecting a mass of people, whose numbers would ensure at least a relative degree of safety
before heading for the center of the city. And thats what Im interested in understanding, how
that embodied activity works, as articulated with virtual technology. A small number of people on
the street, at that point, did have mobile phones and were communicating with the other people
that were leading groups from other parts of the city. It was a composite set of events, in which
media and communications technologies play different roles, depending on the cultural, political
and legal context. Its not at all as if media technologies have an inherently decisive role, which is
the same in all places and in all contexts, and which needs to be studied by a specialist discipline
of media professionals or media studies academics.
MC: Absolutely. Naomi Sakr, for instance, draws attention to the fact that television talk shows
in Egypt were where counter-regime discourses started to seep into the living rooms. Internet and
small media became significant later in the process.
DM: Well, that applies also to the publishing industryThe Yacoubian Building, as a novel,
made a fantastic impact in Cairo, and then again when it was later televised. I suppose there
is that way in which the new media technologies have a kind of cachet, compared with talking
about something as boring and old-fashioned as publishing or television talk shows. Its not so
easy to get people to be as excited about that, but I do remember when I first met the Swedish
anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, he had a line that I liked very much, about how sometimes whats
really needed is some unexciting caution. Its hard to use that as a rallying cry. But he is so

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right, and that is certainly what is needed in relation to what happened in Cairo, and is needed
now in relation to whats been happening in Istanbul. One has to look at where that event has
come from and how it has built up, through what routes, over which periods, to the point where
it now emerges as a visible thing, in the form that it takes. So I think that attempt to look not at
the way in which virtual geographies replace material geographies, but the differential ways in
which virtual geographies are articulated with material geographies and political processes, and
infrastructures, in different situations at different timesthat seems to me the best way forward.
And its not as obviously exciting as Oh wow, lets study how the new media is changing the
world, its probably not such a kind of attractive brand for winning grants, and its probably
not such a good way to make a name for yourself as a young scholar coming into the field, but on
intellectual grounds, that seems to me the only way forward.
MC: To end with two questions: one has to do with the role of interdisciplinarity and cultural
studies, and the second, the definition of empowerment. Is it possible to arrive at a meaningful
definition beyond simplistic accounts such as those that define empowerment as a natural attribute
of technology?
DM: I dont think power is something that can be given to someone by a technology. I mean,
theres been a certain amount of discussion about, Oh look, television isnt dead, its been reinvented by Twitter, because now people tweet while theyre watching television. Well, great, but
I cant quite see the difference between that and the rather more familiar idea of people talking to
each other in the room, while theyre watching television. So I dont think, in that instance, the
capacity to tweet can really be said to empower people in a significant way. I can think back to
the point when my own children were youngone of them had a habit of going in her bedroom
and watching Dallas while on the phone to her friend, so they in effect tweeted about Dallas
only they did it by phone, and my phone bill was very high. But empowermentI mean, its so
difficult to get away from that market liberal consumerist notion that these technologies are going
to empower you to solve your problems.
When Roger Silverstone and I were working on technology use in the late 1980s, the thing that
was being talked up then was the computer. Then Education Secretary Kenneth Baker was trying to convince parents in Britain that unless their children learned computer skills, they would
be unemployableso their parents just had to buy them a computer. What was so clearly resonant, historically, was the earlier 20th century period in which that same role was played by
the encyclopaedia, because there used to be door-to-door salesmen who would go around trying to persuade parents in working class areas of British cities to part with large amounts of
their hard-earned money in order to possess an encyclopaedia. The idea there was, again, rather
magicalthe idea that the encyclopaedia would be a magical object containing the knowledge
that would transform their lives. Now whether youre selling encyclopaedias or selling iPhones
doesnt seem to me significantly different. The magic has simply shifted, now it focuses on this
small, light, beautifully designed object, which can do as much as three shelves of encyclopaedias
could have done. But the idea that the answer is in the thing itself is crazy. The question is how
you use the encyclopaedia, or how you use the iPhone. So, I really cant see how to be interested
in that question, about technological empowerment. Other forms of empowerment, which seem
to me much more significant are not much to do with technologyyou know, like an economy in
which people would have jobs, in which their children could have a future, in which they could

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afford decent housing, in which their health provision would not be as dangerously bad as it is
now in the United Kingdom. Those are the really significant forms of empowerment. But I dont
think theyre going to come through technology.
Indeed, if you take the case of health care, technology is consistently being used to disempower
people. In the British press, I saw this new publicity, about the way to solve the problem of
overload in health service was that when you felt ill, rather than going to the doctor, what
you should do is email them. That struck me as not quite as good as what we might call the
real thing! I mean theyre not called physicians for nothing. Yes, you can look at a body from
a long distance, and you can use a set of technologies, like x-rays, to see into bodies better
even than when you are present, so physical co-presence is not necessarily the only question in
health care, but its still quite a big question. Its pretty obvious that whats going to happen
in Britain is that, for the poor, theres only going to be virtual health care, where you ring up
and somebody will give you advice, Oh go and lay down, take three aspirins, whatever, and
for the rich, there will be an actual doctor or a hospital you can visit, not just a virtual one.
Those are the forms of empowerment that interest me and Im particularly concerned to see
the central role that technology is playing in disempowering people in situations like that. Lets
take traveling. Suppose you have the desire to go to America. You couldnt do it now unless
you had access to a computerbecause now the form you would have to fill in to even apply
for a visa only exists online. That seems to me quite disempowering, if you think about the
extent to which many people in Britain dont have access, on their own terms, to a computer
from which they can do things like print out the documentation that the visa application process
requires you to do. So I suppose I am much more interested in the question of technological
disempowerment, which seems to me a much more important research issue for us to pursue, but
I dont see anybody pursuing that. I think Harry Braverman is badly neglected nowhis work on
how technology de-skills the labourer was very important in the 1970s when I was at CCCS.
Bill Schwarz and his colleagues there in the State Group were trying to pursue that Braverman
line of argument and I think it still has an awful lot to say about whats happening in the labor
process now.
MC: About interdisciplinarity: since you gave the health care example, we must add it is very
much contextual. If we take the human genome project for instance: it could be empowering,
one could claim, to have our genetic maps, to know whether one will get cancer or not and tackle
it early on. But, it can also be very disempowering especially when we have a commercial health
insurance system, which will, in return, deprive us of any kind of health insurance if we happen
to be prone to cancer.
DM: Yes, but it also cuts another way as well, a very dubious way. Even if youve got the health
insurance, what a commercial health insurance will drive you to do is to be tested for more and
more things, which in fact you might suffer from, although you probably dont, but the profit is
in the testing. So there is also another aspecttheres not only the question of those who are
completely excluded from the system, but also, what the system does to those who are in it, how
it prioritizes those aspects of medicine which are profitable, such as more and more testing. There
are lots of diseases, which, at a certain age, you are more likely, as doctors say, to die with than
die of. How useful is it that we should all know all of those bad things that might happen in
10 or 15 or 20 years time? Would that be good? In Britain theres now a lively debate about

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unnecessary surgeries and the production of scares of one kind or another, which are produced
by this system of technologically aided, invasive testing.
But, as we come to a close in my discussion, finally, let me return to the question of interdisciplinarity, which is not an optional extra for me. I mean, sometimes you hear anthropologists
say well, anthropology is ethnography or its nothing. Well, I suppose my equivalent would be
cultural studies is interdisciplinarity, or it is nothing. Thats why, as I said before, Im not interested in the question whether a book is published in media studies, Im interested in the question
if the book, published whether in geography, history, linguistics or whatever, is helpful in understanding the problems of culture and communication. That, for me, constitutes interdisciplinarity.
In the United Kingdom now its difficult institutionallyyou dont get big grants for it easily, but
intellectually, interdisciplinarity is the life and blood of things. For me its the capacity to range
across a very wide range of perspectives in trying to understand a problem. Its no guarantee of
success, sometimes you can get lostyou can end up knowing a little bit about a lot of different
things and not be able to put them together. But without interdisciplinarity, cultural studies is
nothing. The most disconcerting move that keeps being made in these debates is from sociology.
Several times, in recent years, we have seen interventions by people like Simon Frith in Britain
about fifteen years ago; and in the States by Paul Smith and Jeffrey Alexander, in more recent
yearswhere basically, they talk about a renewal of cultural studies, but what theyre actually
talking about is the reduction of cultural studies to a sort of codified sociology of culture, which
wouldnt even be interdisciplinary. I have nothing against sociology, but I dont think sociology,
any more than anthropology or any other discipline, has a monopoly on the truth. Im very, very
resistant to those particular kinds of interventions, which want to insistently sociologize media
and cultural studies and imagine that will somehow solve all our problemsI dont think it will,
at all.
MC: Well, these are territorial battles!
DM: They certainly are! But, tedious as it sometimes is, to have to engage in those sorts of disputes, if, like me, you have a strong commitment to cultural studies as interdisciplinarity, then you
have to stand your ground against those recurring, ill-conceived interventions by people (whether
sociologists or evangelists for some other discipline) who think theyve got all the answers!
MC: Thank you.